The word "futurology" is a neologism coined in 1943 by a refugee German professor of sociology, Ossip K Flechtheim (1909-1998), then teaching in a US college; during the course of his American stay, he met and may have directly influenced Isaac Asimov, who was then beginning to publish the Robot/FoundationFuture History that dominated his career, and whose central character, Hari Seldon, creates a mathematically-precise psychohistorical set of models permitting accurate Prediction of the long-term future of civilization. Flechtheim argued for a concerted effort by sociologists, historians, psychologists, economists and political scientists to examine social and technological trends as a means of learning the true shape of coming things. He sent his proposals to Aldous Huxley, who took them up with enthusiasm, and thereby conveyed the word into the language. The term is seldom used today precisely because it is associated with Flechtheim's goal of creating a new science of probability capable of making reliable predictions, which has not proven possible. Serious practitioners today acknowledge that there are severe limitations on our ability to predict "the future" of anything of consequence, and focus instead on exploring "alternative futures" that could emerge from ongoing trends and emerging developments. The most widely used name for this field of work is now Future Studies, a plural term explicitly recognizing that there are many potential futures ahead shaped by a multitude of factors, including our own aspirations and efforts. Further discussion can be found in this encyclopedia under Futures Studies. [RO]

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We passed a couple of major milestones on 1st August: the SFE is now over 4.5 million words, of which John Clute’s own contribution has now exceeded 2 million. (For comparison, the 1993 second edition was 1.3 million words, and … Continue reading →

We’ve reached a couple of milestones recently. The SFE gallery of book covers now has more than 10,000 images: this one seemed appropriate for the 10,000th. Our series of slideshows of thematically linked covers has continued to grow, and Darren Nash of … Continue reading →

We’ve been talking for a while about new features to add to the SFE, and another one has gone live today: the Gallery, which collects together covers for sf books and links them back to SFE entries. To quote from … Continue reading →